About Me

Known principally for his weekly political columns and his commentaries on radio and television, Chris Trotter has spent most of his adult life either engaging in or writing about politics. He was the founding editor of The New Zealand Political Review (1992-2005) and in 2007 authored No Left Turn, a political history of New Zealand. Living in Auckland with his wife and daughter, Chris describes himself as an “Old New Zealander” – i.e. someone who remembers what the country was like before Rogernomics. He has created this blog as an archive for his published work and an outlet for his more elegiac musings. It takes its name from Bowalley Road, which runs past the North Otago farm where he spent the first nine years of his life. Enjoy.

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The blogosphere tends to be a very noisy, and all-too-often a very abusive, place. I intend Bowalley Road to be a much quieter, and certainly a more respectful, place.So, if you wish your comments to survive the moderation process, you will have to follow the Bowalley Road Rules.These are based on two very simple principles:Courtesy and Respect.Comments which are defamatory, vituperative, snide or hurtful will be removed, and the commentators responsible permanently banned.Anonymous comments will not be published. Real names are preferred. If this is not possible, however, commentators are asked to use a consistent pseudonym.Comments which are thoughtful, witty, creative and stimulating will be most welcome, becoming a permanent part of the Bowalley Road discourse.However, I do add this warning. If the blog seems in danger of being over-run by the usual far-Right suspects, I reserve the right to simply disable the Comments function, and will keep it that way until the perpetrators find somewhere more appropriate to vent their collective spleen.

Followers

Friday, 16 November 2012

Reclaiming Labour

Perfect Harmony: How many Labour Party MPs (especially those in David Shearer's camp) look wistfully at the Chinese Communist Party's five-yearly congress, where all the delegates are hand-picked and the results of every ballot pre-determined?

AND STILL WE WAIT. The Eighteenth Congress of the Communist
Party of China has been and gone and yet, at the time of writing, the world
still doesn’t know the identities of the dozen or so men and women who will
govern China for the next five years.

The manner of choosing the ruling “Standing Committee” of
the CPC’s “Political Bureau” is nothing if not carefully managed. The
Congress’s roughly two thousand delegates are more-or-less hand-picked by a
special party commission. Its task made easier by the fact that these
potentially unruly comrades are only summoned once every five years. That’s a
long time between drinks to the Party’s unconquerable unity, but it does ensure
that the outcome of just about every vote is known long before it is taken.

How many, I wonder, in Labour’s lacklustre caucus have gazed
wistfully at the CPC’s meticulously stage-managed “democracy” and wondered how
it might be imposed on their own increasingly restless rank-and-file?

Especially this weekend, when said rank-and-file show every
sign of reclaiming their party from a caucus whose use-by date –
collectively-speaking – expired a couple of elections ago.

Most New Zealanders will not be much bothered. Such media
coverage as the event attracts will focus almost exclusively on the real or
imagined threats to David Shearer’s leadership. If we are lucky it may also
feature a few excerpts from the “make or break” speech he is scheduled to
deliver on Sunday afternoon. The likely consensus of the assembled scribes?
That “Shearer is safe” – at least until February 2013.

It was not always so. Forty years ago our single public
broadcaster would park an outside broadcast van outside the Wellington Town
Hall and deliver roughly twenty minutes of live interviews, commentaries, and
recorded highlights of proceedings, each day the conference was in session. The
usually three-day conferences of Labour and National would, therefore, receive
an hour of television coverage.

That’s because, forty years ago, party conferences mattered.
New Zealand boasted the highest level of political participation in the Western
World. One in four of the population was enrolled in one of three major
parties: Labour, National and Social Credit. National, under Rob Muldoon
boasted a membership of close to a quarter-of-a-million. Labour in 1984 had a
branch membership of 85,000.

Party conferences were, therefore, events of genuine
democratic significance. The policy remits of rank-and-file members alerted the
electorate to how a very large number of their friends and neighbours were
thinking – and were seriously debated. Mass party memberships also made it
extremely difficult for National and Labour MPs to stray very far from their
party’s principles.

That is why the successful implementation of “Rogernomics”
ultimately required Labour’s destruction as a mass political organisation. Had
upwards of 60,000 members not voted with their feet between 1985 and 1990; and
had the remaining dissidents not decamped with Jim Anderton to form the
NewLabour Party; such a treacherous mix of economic and social policies could
never have endured.

And it is here that we come to the nub of Labour’s present
difficulties. If it expands and democratises itself, the party’s incomplete
(and, therefore, insincere) repudiation of neoliberalism will not be permitted
to stand.

Helen Clark understood this very well, which is why she
imposed a level of discipline on Labour that would have made the CPC blanche.
Ms Clark’s caucus removed the formation of policy from party hands. For the
fifteen long years of her domination, most of the senior positions in the party
were filled by “elections” that were effectively uncontested. In 2008, her
reign over, she was permitted, in classic CPC style, to nominate and install
her own successor.

Apres Moi, Le Deluge: Helen Clark preserved Labour as a political force, but only by imposing an iron discipline upon its members and eliminating as many opportunities for dissent as possible.

This is the legacy that Labour’s rank-and-file members are
gathering at Auckland’s Ellerslie Convention Centre this weekend to either
decisively repudiate or, fatally, extend. If they seize the right to choose
(and dismiss) their own party leader; to determine and enforce their own policy
platform; and, by reaching out to their fellow citizens with genuine
people-first-money-second policies, to rebuild a mass political organisation;
then Labour will survive and prosper.

If they bow to the demands (no matter how silkily presented)
of Labour’s parliamentary caucus, then the party’s long and increasingly
dysfunctional descent into electoral disconnection and political irrelevance
will continue.

The world hasto wait for the CPC. New Zealand will not wait for Labour.

This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 16 November 2012.

7 comments:

Spot on. I remember going to the Party Conference (or had they changed the name to "Congress"?) sometime in the mid-1990s to hear relatively new leader Helen Clark, and coming away thinking that the conference had degenerated into a completely stage-managed show for the cameras. I had thought the first NZLP conference I attended (ChCh, 1978, I think) was stage-managed by Party President Arthur Faulkner, but that was more gentle manipulation by comparison with Clark's regime. (My response to Faulkner may have been conditioned by close reading of H.S. Thompson's account of the 1972 Democratic Party Convention.)

I get the feeling that everybody interested in New Zealand politics are metaphorically holding their breathe. Do we get leadership? Do we get a real opposition? Will this cause the government to take real action? Will Shearer prove himself to be competent and therefor a genuine contender in the next election. Or will he be replaced?

Many of our problems have been well examined and the needed actions are well known. Take housing, BNZ's Andrew Thorburn describes how it is leadership that we need. http://www.interest.co.nz/kiwisaver/62066/bnzs-andrew-thorburn-hits-out-fundamental-anomalies-tax-system-favour-residential-pr

Well Chris, the Labour Party membership did take the Party back yesterday! In February next year and after every Election, the Caucus will have a vote to endorse the Leader. Unless that Leader can win 60% endorsement by the Caucus, the vote will go out to the entire Party -- Caucus, the membership and the affiliates -- on a 40%, 40%, 20% basis. What made me so proud of yesterday's debate was that those arguing for the members' right to have a say in who shall be their Leader all argued for that principle (democracy for the people), not to diss Shearer. Unfortunately those arguing for a trigger that could have blocked the members getting a vote, accused the democrats of ulterior motives. And in the back rooms, they bullied and cajolled, but to no avail. Today we vote on a progressive policy platform that all MPs and other elected Labour people will be bound by. It thoroughly repudiates the legacy of the 1980s and returns Labour to its social democratic roots. It is a Policy Platform for "our people" devleoped by the people.